Designing Serious Games for Cyber Ranges: A Socio-technical Approach

Appropriate training is an effective solution to tackle the evolving threat landscape and conflicts in the cyber domain and to fulfill security requirements. Serious games demonstrate pedagogic effectiveness in this field, however, they need to comply with national, organizational, and individual strategies and characteristics. These games provide the players, individually or in groups, with an opportunity to develop their adversarial and system thinking skills to set up effective defenses. To this end, in this paper, we propose a framework for designing serious games that raise security awareness. The proposed framework considers the complex nature of the cyber domain, the knowledge and motivation of participants, and the experiential learning using cyber ranges. The framework is based on existing frameworks, and integrates their advantages to form a comprehensive framework. Future research should refine the framework and design serious games to evaluate its effectiveness in producing desired end results.